Imaginary Europes

Elisabeth Bekers is Professor of British and Postcolonial Literature at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. She researches literature from Africa and its diaspora, and currently focuses on black British women’s writing. Her publications include the co-edited volumes Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe (2009) and Brussel schrijven/ Écrire Bruxelles (2016). Maggie Ann Bowers is a Senior Lecturer in Literatures in English at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Her research covers contemporary postcolonial studies, focusing particularly on Native American studies and comparative multi-ethnic literatures of North America. She is the author of Magic(al) Realism (2004). Her recent research has examined the links between storytelling, ritual, and law and sovereignty in Native American writing. Sissy Helff is a freelance anglicist with a broad range of interests in Anglophone world literature, postcolonial and transcultural studies, visual culture, history, and politics. Her recent book, Unreliable Truths: Transcultural Homeworlds in Indian Women’s Fiction of the Diaspora (2012), is an overview of Indian diasporic women’s writing from around the world.

Introduction – Imaginary Europes, phantoms of the past, conceptions of the future? 1. Fragile balance: Imaginary Europes, transcultural aesthetics and discourses of European identity in Pawel Pawlikowski’s Last Resort and Steven Spielberg’s War Horse 2. British imaginings of a European periphery: Roger Scruton, Michael Palin and Michael Booth in/on Finland 3. Bursting the bubble: Mythical Englishness, then and now 4. Wanton and sensuous in the Musée du Quai Branly: Gerald Vizenor’s cosmoprimitivist visions of France 5. Asia’s Europes: Anti-colonial attitudes in the novels of Ondaatje and Shamsie 6. Long distance Afrikaners: Afrikaans literature and dislocated identity in a European context 7. Writing back or writing off? Europe as "tribe" and "traumascape" in works by Caryl Phillips and Christos Tsiolkas